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Patrick Patience has posted a fantastic little summary of jailbreaking hacks over at Smoking Apples. He’s got some gorgeous themes and extensions working together, complete with links and extended info—it’s definitely worth taking a look.
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The “Deep” iPhone theme, well photographed by William Hook.
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I’m considering using this free set of mobile icons for some demo apps. You get what you pay for, though, they unfortunately don’t scale very well at smaller sizes.
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Design Police offers a downloadable “Visual Enforcement Kit” (PDF) with labels for everything from “Bad typography” to “Sever lack of creativity.” I would pay good money to get these as stickers, and I would probably use them every day until being fined for defacing private property.
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The use of motion in the Windows Phone 7 Series user interface is brilliant.
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As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison. In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.
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I’d be remiss not to mention the release of Windows Phone 7 Series last week. Microsoft has taken a leap of faith here—completely reworking their mobile offering from the ground up. There is a newfound focus on touch and gestures, UI design, and social networking integration. I think Microsoft has a success here. In addition to a generally pleasant looking user interface (though Tufte disagrees), the software is also hardware independent like Google’s Android—in contrast with Apple’s closed iPhone OS. Unfortunately, there are no actual devices yet which run Windows Phone 7 Series, though I’m sure we’ll see some very soon. All in all, the release may not be enough to save the failing mobile platform (primarily from the burden of IE), but it looks a great last stand.
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There has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks on whether or not the iPad (and iPhone for that matter) should support multitasking. Many people seem to have a different interpretation of what this means, whether it’s just listening to Pandora while browsing the web, having a faster way to switch apps running in the background (akin to WebOS’s concept of “cards”), or just having an app be able to fetch data in the background.
I’ll be posting some more thoughts on multitasking throughout the day, but first a quick poll: Do you want multitasking? Why or why not?
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Mozilla has posted these Firefox 4.0 Mac mockups. They look a bit contrasty and noisy to me, and the background loading indicator looks very awkward, but overall there are some nice new ideas being introduced.
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I know I posted a similar set earlier, but Flickr user, Designing Web Interfaces, has created a stunning collection of photos detailing iPad interactions.
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iA has created a created an Omnigraffle stencil set for the iPad, based on the iPad GUI PSD from Teehan and Lax. Looks like a nice way to put simple screens together quickly.
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Panelfly, a beautiful comic book app for the iPhone, has announced their plans to support the iPad. They’ve already mocked up a great selection of screens—each showing incredible attention to detail and level of innovation for a yet unreleased OS.
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“I live in the browser most of the day, and every time I have to leave that to run something that’s not browser-based, that’s actually more annoying than positive. So our current thinking is to keep it in tabs.”
- Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director at Chrom OS, Google talks Chrome OS, HTML5, and the future of software -
Fabio Sasso has created a fantastic demo showcasing what’s possibly using CSS3 and even provides all the code as a download.